Motion Control and Motor Drives

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using serial port to communicate with servo motor drive

I wish to use Labview 7.1 to control a brushless servo motor with encoder (from MCG) and digital drive (from AMC) via the serial port. The application simply involves progressively loading the shaft on the motor in 180 degree increments, and reading the torque. Is this possible? If so, how complicated is this approach? Thanks!
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Communicating with your AMC drive via LabVIEW is no problem. There is an example in the Example Finder (Help >> Find Examples . . ) called Basic Serial Write and Read.vi which will show how to send and receive serial commands. You will have to find out what serial commands your drive responds to by looking at the AMC drive user manual. Certainly there are commands to position your servo motor at various increments and at various speeds.

As for reading torque, however, I would be surprised if the drive would directly output a torque value. One possibility might be to read the current being sent to the servo and then interpret that into a torque reading - provided that the drive has a serial command to read the current output (normally servo motors have a fairly linear current to torque conversion). Current to Torque conversions are motor specific and the accuracy using such a method might not be to good.

A more accurate method would be to use a torque sensor (Transducer Techniques sells these along with many other sensor companies) - or to use a strain gauge. Both types of sensors would need to be read in with a DAQ board (see link for National Instruments DAQ boards).

Hopefully this gives you some ideas - good luck with your project!
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